what do we know about raw foods in the last 70 years?  off the top of
my
head

1. e. coli infections from raw apples (odwalla case) or eggnog can
kill you
2. too much sugar from raw carrot juice can give you diabetes.
3. too much sugar depresses your immune system.
4. tomatoes have lycopene, which helps prostate cancer.  It's more
available
if the tomatoes have been cooked.
5. raw garlic and onions have sulfur compounds that have anticancer /
antibiotic / anticholesterogenic properties.
6. alfalfa sprouts have saponins that in excess can cause problems
7. raw / low fat diets are inappropriate for children
8. raw meat can have parasites that can do beaucoup damage.
9. prions from raw offal fed to cows can cause bovine spongiform
encephelopathy
10. recent discovery that high fiber diets (like you'd get in a raw
food
diet) don't reduce colon cancer rates
11. cooked soybeans have antiestrogen properties that help reduce
cholesterol, and breast and prostate cancer rates.  And maybe cause
your
brain to shrink.
12. raw mung beans have antinutrient properties that you want to avoid
13. raw egg has antinutrient avidin that interferes with cobalamine
(B12)
14. aflatoxins can cause liver cancer.  i suppose molds like it could
grow
on raw sprouts.
15. calorie reduced / nutrient enriched diets probably enhance
longevity.
cooked foods can be nutrient enriched.  raw foods can be calorie
reduced.
16. charred (cooked) meats have carcinogenous nitroamines
17. raw chlorophyll's structure gets reused in making hemoglobin.  The
magnesium gets replaced with an iron, but the rest of the molecule is
used
virtually as is.  (I find this amazing.)
18 raw greendrinks contains exotic-sounding antioxidents like
peroxidase
and superoxide dismutase.  http://www.bluemoon.net/~blm/bg_art2.htm
antioxidents soak up the free radicals that current theory suspects
are a
major factor in aging
19. native americans would use boiling water to leach the tannins out
of the
acorns that were a staple of their diets.  (Ok this has been known for
more
than 70 years.)
20. polynesians use cooking to deactivate the poison in the cassava /
manioc
root, making tapioca (ditto)
21. eating a variety of fruits and vegetables is probably optimal.
(For
instance, lately strawberries, blueberries, and blackberries have been
shown
to have especially high levels of beneficial antioxidizing
phytopigments.
cherries have antipain properties.
http://www.newscientist.com/ns/19990206/newsstory6.html) Having access
to
frozen or cooked fruits and vegetables adds to the variety available
to one.

if you're wanting a food guru to tell you what's what, i have a lot of
respect for dr. weil.  www.pathfinder.com/drweil.

speaking of gurus - the swami that brought hinduism to the US in 1910,
Paramahansa Yogananda
http://www.selfrealizationfellowship.com/ay/index.html, urged a cooked
food
diet.  After he died, the church passed to a live foodist disciple of
his,
who almost immediately died of pneumonia.  So that doesn't reflect
well on
raw foodism.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Ingrid Bauer/J-C Catry" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, May 18, 2000 11:25 PM
Subject: Re: Licorice

> >Having said that, it's shocking to me that people are designing their
> eating
> >lives around 70-year old, nonreproducible science.  The leucocytosis
study
> >would appear to be trivial to try to redo.  But more to the point, white
> >blood cell count is an extremely crude biomarker.  Biochemistry has
> advanced
> >incredibly in the last 70 years.  To gamble one's health on such poor
> >science seems unwise to me.
>
> so what those 70 years gave us , as informations about the difference , in
> nature and effects,  between cooked and raw foods?
> jean-claude
>